Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) is gaining more and more attention from business leaders. Its focus is the future of the business. The FP&A professionals who work as Finance Business Partners understand basic accounting and reporting, yet their strength is in being from different ‘walks of life’.
Rolling Forecast can become the path leading to better company’s profitability and improved operating performance. This is a popular process in the FP&A world. Many companies tackle the idea of taking it.
Why, when everyone hates it, do we still have traditional budgeting? My tentative answer to this would be that most people were not aware of the alternatives.
In the period from 2001 to 2006, the Retail division of Swiss Post transformed itself from a public service company into a business driven sales organization. Crucial drivers of change were, on the one hand, the adaptation of the steering systems up to the final implementation of a "Beyond Budgeting" philosophy and, on the other hand, a humanistic attitude of management and finance department against all employees. The success was amazing: The division succeeded in increasing the sales of new retail products from 0 to over 400 million CHF, optimizing the bottom line by more than 100 million CHF or more than 5 percentage points and becoming the first state-owned company in Switzerland to win the EFQM- Award for Business Excellence.
I’d like to claim that I am not easily annoyed….but that would be untrue. And one of the things that are guaranteed to irritate me is glib statements from people who claim to be experts – particularly if it is part of an act to get people to buy something.
Driver-based planning (DBP) is an essential part of the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) armoury, enabling organisations – ranging from the smallest non-profit to a multinational – to become quicker, more dynamic and agile in their planning and in responding to internal and external changes in the business environment.